Actually, if you read the university press release, you'll see the magical ingredient is silicon. Current lithium-ion batteries already contain graphene sheets. What they did was

sandwich silicon between the graphene sheets, because silicon can bind many more ions than carbon (the downside is that it fragments, and that's what they addressed with their sandwiching process) -> more capacity

make minuscule holes in the graphene sheets to offer shortcuts to ions traveling from one side of the sheet to the other side (-> faster charging)

it doesn't surprise me at all that scientists are finding all sorts of neat uses for graphene. (curious, that's NOT in my dictionary here...) The main novelty here is they're dealing with a building material on an atomic scale. Since things behave very differently at those scales, it's only natural to find new uses for it. And this is only one element they're working with. Imagine what all awaits discovery at the nano scale?

It's like all these years you've been somehow managing to fix fine swiss watches using a baseball bat and tire iron for tools, getting at best mediocre results and only modest improvements from time to time. Now someone hands you a tweezers. Hey, this works better! really? They need to explore other nano materials instead of concentrating all their time on this one new one.

Actually, if you read the university press release, you'll see the magical ingredient is silicon. Current lithium-ion batteries already contain graphene sheets. What they did was

sandwich silicon between the graphene sheets, because silicon can bind many more ions than carbon (the downside is that it fragments, and that's what they addressed with their sandwiching process) -> more capacity

make minuscule holes in the graphene sheets to offer shortcuts to ions traveling from one side of the sheet to the other side (-> faster charging)

That's not quite the whole story: current lithium-ion battery designs have *graphite* in them, which is a bit disingenuous to describe merely as "many layers of graphene". The fact that in this design, they are in discrete multiple layers (with silicon and, as a result of this research, perforations) is what makes the difference. To my knowledge (correct me if I am wrong) no commercial battery has discrete graphene layers in it (graphene is a relatively new area of research, circa 2004, and conventional li-ion battery design has been relatively unchanged for about 20 years.)

No, in this case, "10 times" had nothing to do with multiplication. It's simply a statement of the number of instances on which they reduced the recharge time. "On last tuesday, we reduced the the recharge time by 1%. On wednesday, we got an extra 1%. We did that up to 8 more times (we lost count, but that's the upper bound)"

Crispy, near-burnt bacon is best. If it flexes, it can still be cooked.

There are many good things about the US (tolerance, the ability to laugh at yourselves, Megan Fox) but your food is generally vile, and charred streaky bacon (as we would call it here in the UK) is one of the worst offenders. Bacon is supposed to be thick and have meat on it, not just be a black version of pork crackling.

If it's so easy, then why does Apple state [apple.com] that "MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro models with built-in batteries should be replaced only by an Apple Authorized Service Provider, Apple Retail Store, or Apple Service Depot"?

This is a must read article on the subject. Electric cars fail because batteries are too expensive, and because they required infrastructure of charging stations. This company however solves both these problems. You make an electric car without the battery, which is cheaper than a standard car and more reliable to boot. Then this company leases you a battery, which costs less per month than gas. And they handle the infrastructure, which includes stations that swap your battery out for a fully charged one. You never wait to charge your battery, and they can swap it out since you don't own it.

Part of this model is the assumption that battery technology still moves along rapidly. So the company can phase in newer, better batteries and you aren't tied to a battery you purchased when you bought your car.

Last time I checked, this company was rolling out in select places like Denmark, Israel and Hawaii. It is easier to roll out initially in places with dense populations, and harder to roll out when the population is spread out. Once the model is proven to work, I expect it to spread.

Close... They are rolling out in areas that have closed traffic systems, so called traffic islands. In Hawaii they have a traffic island because Hawaii is physically a collection of islands. Israel is a traffic island because Israelis rarely drive out of Israel, relations with the neighbors being what they are. Density is certainly a part of it but the closed nature of the roadways is a bigger one.

I like the idea but it makes you dependent on them plus you need to live/work at driving distance of one of their station

A similar argument could be made against internal-combustion automobiles: you are dependent on oil companies and you need to live/work at driving distance to a filling station. I know these are facile comparisons, but I hardly think that these limitations make Better Place an impossible or useless proposition. There are lots of people that live/work in an urban area that could have a sprinkling of such stations. You can recharge the battery at home or work like a typical EV. Being able to swap it out is a way to reduce capital cost/risk in owning a battery outright, and allows you to get a full charge in a few minutes when you need.

Managing that battery inventory is going to be a huge problem. How are you going to make sure each 'gas station' has enough batteries on hand. Since they're not cheap, it's a huge cost. This might not be a huge problem in the city, but that's not where people have a fear of running out of battery. Heck, a simple EV you charge at home would suffice if you simply traveled in the city.

It's the spaces in the cities or commuters.The roll out and management of this is a huge problem.

But even assuming you could manage that well enough, there is another minor problem.

Maybe I'm just paranoid coming from Africa where people will steal anything making infrastructure hard to build out... but you're talking about an expensive batter than can be 'easily swapped out'. Something tells me that makes it 'easy to steal'.

I'm pretty sure you can replace everything you've just typed there with respects to a battery and use the word petrol.

Also presumably you'd only need a new battery when the life in the one you have is exhausted, or you need instant charge. Either way surly that's a easier logistical problem that ensuring the local forecourt has petrol?

Petrol and 'batteries' are in no way comparable. You have to look at the 'cost' per 'fill-up'

With gasoline, you're looking at managing something that costs $50 / fill-up. If you have excess gasoline... who cares. It stays in the tank and it's all good.

With batteries, you're looking at managing something that costs $5000 / fill up (remember, you're renting the entire battery pack, not just the charge). If you have excess batteries, it's a huge overhead burden.

Gas is relatively cheaper in the United States than England. The last time I traveled to England, gas was something like $3/gallon in the United States and the equivalent (pounds and litre conversion) to $7/gallon in England.

Filling up a sedan with a 14 gallon tank for $50 isn't unreasonable in the United States. That being said, it isn't fair to say that a fill up costs $5000.

The battery on hand might cost that, but the fueling station isn't paying $5000 each time they swap a battery. And keeping several of these batteries on hand is a one-time fixed cost. A gas/petrol station pays daily to have their fuel tanks filled. I actually managed a gas/petrol station while in between IT jobs. Giant tanker trunks have to drive the fuel to each station, which is horribly inefficient and costly.

I haven't seen the Better Place design, but they could use underground conveyors. The batteries aren't just sitting around where they can be stolen. The conveyor moves the battery underground to the robotic arm that swaps it at your car. It wouldn't be vastly different from how gas/petrol stations store all their gas underground.

yes, $50/ fillup. I'm Canadian and drive a small 4 cylinder. That's what it costs me to fill up.

Try running a business... any business.

But if it helps. Let's work through this example.Let's suppose you run the gas station and want to keep enough reserves to service 1000 fill-ups.

Using gasoline (assuming $50/fill up), you need inventory worth 1000*50 = $50,000. Need more gas, you just have it delivered on demand. It's easy to manage supply and demand here given the low cost per fillup.

Using battery exchange, you would need 1000 battery packs. That's an inventory of 1000 * $5000/battery pack... that's $5,000,000. Not to mention the huge space this would take to store the batteries. Not to mention the complexity of the batteries (failure rates...).

Again, I'm not saying it's impossible. But it is significantly more difficult and requires significantly higher capital costs to have a battery exchange style system.

What is easier to store? Gasoline for 1000 cars or battery packs for 1000 cars? Your typical gas station has a couple thousand gallons of gas below it. A battery pack for elevtric cars occupies 16 cubic feet(figure 4'x4' area). To store enough batteries for 1000 cars will require 16'000 feet of storage or roughly the area occupied by a 5 bay mechanics garage.

It will also by using more power than a hospital. And you need one on every street corner. Even with home charging we will need to double the electtical capacity and output of the USA in order to move a significant populations to electric cars.

Take a look at the whole problem. It is really scary when you put hard numbers into play.

You don't need to store 1000 batteries, you only need to store enough for X hours worth of demand. So you take data on your gas station and find the busiest X hours in history, where X is the number of hours it takes to charge a battery. From that you find that you had N cars in your busiest X hours. So then you set up N charging stations with N spare batteries. You can multiply N by some fudge factor to give you the ability to handle failures, unprecedented spikes in demand, etc.

Hard numbers are indeed scary, and we humans are scaredy cats so we evolved this lovely brain to help us out.

Wow apples-to-orages much? a couple thousand gallons of gas will not fuel 1000 cars, so why compare the storage space to batteries for 1000 cars? Also every time you're swapping a battery, so each station only needs enough batteries that it has time to recharge before that battery is needed again. Unlike a gas station where you need to have massive trucks trying to get through tiny downtown streets to refuel all the stations.

If everyone switched to electric tomorrow then yes, infrastructure would be an issue. Amount of energy would not be (what do you think we're going to do with all the gas if we aren't using it in the cars? Just stop buying oil because we like brown-outs?) You're being scared by numbers that we already have, just calculate the potential energy in the fuel in all the gas stations in the country. Then stop fear-mongering.

Battery swapping is going to look like a hilariously silly idea 5-10 years from now when an electric car can drive plenty far enough on a single charge. Heck even now you can buy quick-charging electric cars off the showroom floor that can reach an 80% charge in 30 minutes.

And to the guy about to post "Electric cars are a joke! I drive 900 miles every day you know!" well stick to your Ford Ranger with jerry cans in the back, but don't pretend that most people have any use for such range.

You still need room to store and charge the batteries. One of today's batteries for pure EVs takes up far more space than 10-15 gallons of gasoline. Then you also need the machinery to swap them, because they're heavy. A facility the size of a standard gas station won't cut it.

We're far more likely to see this new battery tech in use in the next 15 years than this other guy's battery swap model.

Except for the fact that Agassi is in charge of the business. And he is running it with the mind set of ending the dependency on oil more than maximizing profits. He has the fuck-you money to do precisely that. He went to Israel first, because they absolutely don't want to depend on oil from their enemies, so it is in their vested interest to put government dollars behind this as well.

Denmark and Hawaii invested dollars because they're concerned about the environment. If you get the right people on board, i

So if this battery has ten times the capacity of standard Lithium ion batteries, and after a year it's only five times more. That means its capacity falls off by 50% per year. I guess that would be fine for phones, but not so much for cars. It would be quite the environmental nightmare if car owners threw out their gigantic batteries every three years because the car had only 1/8 of the range it had when you drove it off the lot.

If we could combine all the tech from all of the battery stories we've read in the past year, we could power an interstallar craft for a year with a single AAA battery and recharge it by rubbing it on a fluffy shirt for a few seconds.

Having read the article (*gasp*) as well as a few others it seems these batteries do NOT hold 10x more power. They degrade 10x slower on on drain/recharge cycles and can be charged 10x faster. BUT this is not the same as having 10x more POWER per cycle. Gonna have to wait some more before you get an cheap electric car that can go 500 miles before charging (though charging 10x faster is nice).

We'll likely never replace them in traditional sense. You burn fuel completely and irreversibly in an internal combustion engine, while you have a reversible chemical reaction in Li-ion battery. Reversibility carries a very heavy tag.

... they'll fit right into the steady curve of slowly but steadily increasing battery capacity. People assume that all these battery advancements we keep hearing about never pan out. Well, some of them do, but once the researchers silly claims are brought down to be a bit more realistic, and after the years go by before they actually hit the market, they're just incremental improvements on what was available before they came out.

...but once the researchers silly claims are brought down to be a bit more realistic...

Make sure you distinguish between the claims that are made by the researchers and the claims that are made by human resources/technology transfer/publicity departments. Anyone who has ever seen that particular machine in action will attest to its ability to transform modest scientific claims into ones would make a late-night infomercial host blush.

Although it is subtle, battery technology has improve energy density steadily over the years. For lithium-ion, the trend has been about 5-10% / year for over a decade now. The battery pack from my ten-year old laptop (yeah, it's sittin' in a box somewhere) has just over half the nominal capacity of a battery of similar volume today. It's not Moore's Law, but it is there.

On the other hand, with the exponential increase in transistor count / computing power has some a corollary effect of decreasing energy needed to do that computation: Koomey's Law [wikipedia.org]. So if I take a look at the battery pack from my 5-y.o. flip phone and compare it to what's in an iPhone, they are roughly the same volume. But the newer battery has more capacity, and the newer phone does jumping jacks around my old feature phone, and has about the same amount of talk time / standby time, if not more.

Call me an optimist, but I think that in this regard we're still coming out ahead.

Still, the main use case they are touting in the summary is cars. Faster charging, higher storage density batteries are a huge deal in that space. One of the big complaints with electric cars is that they take much longer to charge than a gas powered car takes to fill up, so faster charging is a big deal. More power density means either a) you can store the same amount of power in fewer batteries (thus theoretically reducing the weight and cost) or b) can get much farther on the same sized battery.

Right now electric cars are right on the cusp of being really commercially viable. If they become a hair cheaper, a hair longer range, a hair quicker to charge... it could put them over the top. This has the potential to do all three, and if the research is accurate increase all of them by more than a hair.

Plus, you know, I wouldn't complain if my iPhone went 3 days without a charge.

These 'amazing new tech' articles are cool and everything, but in a way, I'd rather have stories about how batteries on the market RIGHT NOW hold 10% more energy on average than they did last year. I like seeing more tangible stuff as well as the more speculative news.

I was specifically thinking of Voyager 2 [wikipedia.org], which is described as being on an interstellar mission right now (technically, it might still be in our solar system depending on how exactly you define the boundaries). Such a mission for humans is not really possible, or barely so. Might technically be possible to send a person out there, not really sure. Point was, something won't become a feasible reality until it stops being expensive and inefficient.

Compare a $10k used car to $10k electric car: The cost of a decent LiFePO4 battery pack is $6k

That seems like a problem in your argument. There is no electric car+battery combination which costs $16k. The figure you cite is less than half the actual retail cost of an electric car+battery. Even the prius plug-in, due next year, costs over $30k, and the battery pack only provides a 10 mile range.

The cost of electricity to recharge the pack is ~$0.10

Retail electricity for residential consumers in states which don't burn coal is about $0.14/KwH, not $0.10. If we burn coal to generate electricity, then we've negated any environmental benefit of electric cars, so we should use the $0.14/KwH price for electricity. Electricity from renewables would be at least 50% more expensive than even that.

Let's try a comparison with these figures. The Nissan Leaf costs $35,000, and an approximately equivalent Nissan Versa Hatchback costs $15,000. If we drive the versa for 150,000 miles with $4/gal fuel at 35 mpg, we pay $17,142 for fuel. If we drive the Leaf for 150,000 mi (which is the rated life of the battery pack), the fuel (electricity) would cost $8,400 (leaf has a 24 KwH battery pack which costs $3.36 to recharge at $0.14/KwH and takes us 60 mi on average, for a per-mile charge of $0.056, *100,000 = $8,400).

We must also include the cost of financing. Interest at 3% above inflation for 5 years would cost $2250 for the Versa and $5250 for the Leaf. Even if you pay using cash upfront, you are foregoing interest you could have earned by investing the same money, so it's an opportunity cost.

There will also be different insurance costs, for insuring a $15,000 car against theft vs. a $35,000 car. But let's ignore that now.

Of course the government will give you a $7,500 tax break right now if you buy an electric car, but will only do so for a small number of buyers until the incentive expires, so let's ignore that now because it's not generalizable.

The total cost of the Versa for 150k mi is $34,392, and the total cost of the Leaf for the same distance is $48,650. It costs about 41% more to drive a similar electric car at present, not counting insurance or limited-time government incentives. It is not cost-competitive.

It's possible that an electric car will become competitive if gasoline costs far more in the future and batteries cost less. If the Leaf costs $30k in the future and gasoline costs $7/gal (in 2011 dollars), then the Leaf would be approximately cost-competitive with a gasoline-powered car. This circumstance is definitely possible within the next 15 years.